About “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

T. S. Eliot’s self-described “drama of literary anguish” paints a portrait of the sexual frustration of a man obsessed with his own inadequacy. Begun in 1910 (when he was 22) and published in 1915, “Prufrock” was Eliot’s breakout masterpiece and almost certainly an expression of his own anxieties: he was still a virgin at age 26. More than that, it is about a search for authenticity, the courage to take control of one’s fundamental being. It is, in essence, a poem about existentialism.(

No definitive source for the title character’s name has been identified, although there was a Prufrock-Litton furniture store in St. Louis, Missouri at the time Eliot lived there. Comic and fussy-sounding, “Prufrock” seems to combine echoes of “prudishness” and the “frock” of a priest (suggesting primness, religiosity, or abstinence). Its claim to be a ‘love song’ is ironic. There is no mention or evidence of love in the poem; the women are distant, pretentious creatures or objects of Prufrock’s repressed sexual desire, andof his failure to assert his authentic sense of self.

The poem has had a major impact on subsequent literature and pop culture, from Nick Carraway’s anxieties about aging in The Great Gatsby to the Eliot quotations peppering Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to the 1995 Crash Test Dummies hit “Afternoons & Coffeespoons,” all the way to John Green’s YA bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, in which Hazel Grace quotes the first and last stanzas. In 2015 one writer for The Atlantic even credited the poem with inventing the hipster.

About how old is Alfred Prufrock?

Though he is paranoid about growing old and running out of time to find romantic fulfillment, we don’t know how old he really is. Prufrock is a man who’s given up on youth and is acting elderly before his time. Since he is a reflection of Eliot’s own sexual frustration, Prufrock is likely around the age of 22, Eliot’s age when he was writing the poem.